Poultry Keepers Podcast

Why?....What?....Part 1

• Rip Stalvey, Mandelyn Royal, and John Gunterman • Season 2 • Episode 76

Share episode

In this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, hosts Rip, Mandelyn, and John discuss various aspects of poultry keeping that perplex and interest them. 

They question the effort and expense invested in poultry, reflecting on the joy and purpose behind raising birds. The conversation covers the emotional and practical challenges of harvesting birds for meat and addresses common misconceptions such as the need for grit in poultry diets and the importance of breeding for local environment resistance. 

The hosts emphasize the importance of proper husbandry and responsible medication use. They also highlight the value of knowledge sharing within the poultry community to maintain and improve poultry genetics and care.

You can email us at - poultrykeeperspodcast@gmail.com
Join our Facebook Groups:

Poultry Keepers Podcast -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/907679597724837
Poultry Keepers 360 - - https://www.facebook.com/groups/354973752688125
Poultry Breeders Nutrition - https://www.facebook.com/groups/4908798409211973

Check out the Poultry Kepers Podcast YouTube Channel -
https://www.youtube.com/@PoultryKeepersPodcast/featured

Alex:

Hi and welcome to another Poultry Keepers Podcast. In this episode our hosts Rip, Mandelyn, and John talk about the things that leave them scratching their heads. We call it Why? and What?

Rip Stalvey:

Mandelyn, what's your first question about a why or what?

Mandelyn Royal:

Why do we put all this effort and expense into these birds? Sometimes I ask that of myself when I'm out doing chores when it's 10 degrees outside and everything's frozen.

John Gunterman:

Oh my gosh, that's a whole episode, or months of episodes.

Rip Stalvey:

I just started to say, that's a book worth right there. And, and that's a good question. I've asked myself that many times. But, no, I get a lot of personal satisfaction out of it. I get to help other people. And poultry is just fun to me, just downright fun. There's no other way to look at it.

Mandelyn Royal:

I always remind myself that there's a purpose to the flock, and it's where my breakfast comes from, it's where my dinner comes from. And it's where my future flock is going to come from. And since I'm breeding for our own future flock. I just need to remind myself every once in a while, it's worth it, keep going and look forward to great things coming from them because eventually it does pay off in the flock result.

John Gunterman:

Yeah, I enjoy eating. I think we all do. I enjoy cooking and eating. That's no secret. But I've also found an incredible sense of peace in my birds. We all know that I am a veteran and I've been to some places and they're very calming. A lot easier to keep than bees. Bees will sting you if you're out in the yard and working and not in the right mindset. Chickens will just stay out of your way and they really help.

Rip Stalvey:

They bring so much joy just watching them. John, you're absolutely right. I can have so much. Pleasure and enjoyment just going out, sitting on a five gallon bucket with a glass of tea or a cup of coffee, just watching those chickens do their thing. It's just so relaxing.

John Gunterman:

There's some mornings where it's cold, it's negative 20, I don't want to get out of bed, but my birds need me. They need food, they need water, let's get up and take care of them. Sometimes my wife jokes that I take better care of my birds than myself, and that's absolutely true.

Mandelyn Royal:

That is true. They get their breakfast before I get mine.

John Gunterman:

Take care of the dog and the birds and then us. But that does highlight the importance. They are barnyard animals, but they do become very close emotionally as well. So some people do struggle with the harvest and the unaliving part, but that is a big part of it that we need to come to terms with.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, that was a difficult transition to go from just a layer flock to a flock that was giving us our meat too, and wrapping my mind around those emotions that come from that at the end of the day. After I have a freezer full of food, it's actually more satisfying because I know what went into them. I know every step of their rearing, they had a whole bunch of good days. And even on their last day, it still wasn't a bad day because we don't transport them. We don't haul them out. So they don't go through high periods of stress. And then we get to eat, and then I get to hatch another batch and watch a whole new group come up.

Rip Stalvey:

And the cycle continues. Yeah. I can see how people would have a hard time making that transitional step to where they're actually processing their own birds, and I get that. I get that.

John Gunterman:

It's

Rip Stalvey:

hard,

John Gunterman:

but if you get hungry enough.

Mandelyn Royal:

John, you had some good questions. Yes, I did.

John Gunterman:

Wow. Mine were some of the things that just set you off when you see people. An innocuous question online and you get 10 people just parrot back the same wrong advice. Oh, crumbles are water soluble.

Mandelyn Royal:

You don't need grit.

John Gunterman:

You don't need grit. Okay, so this kind of ties into one of the things that you brought up about why are we treating avians like mammals? Yes. They're not mammals.

Rip Stalvey:

There's so many differences. I wrote an article a couple of days ago on that. I haven't. I haven't posted it to any of the group yet, but it's coming, but

John Gunterman:

Well, insisting their birds need supplemental heat. All they're doing is setting themselves up for failure in one way or the other. We've all seen way too many coop fire disasters. Unfortunately, but also if you're relying on supplemental heat, you're breeding in the wrong direction, you want to be breeding for resistance to your local environment because when the electricity fails is when the heat fails, and that's invariably going to be the coldest, darkest storm of the year. When your birds now are relying on the heat the most, and they don't have it, versus being acclimated to it, and they can cruise right through it with no problem.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. One of those types of questions that really gets me going, is I see somebody posting, My chicken has the sniffles, what should I do? And immediately it seems like 50 folks jump on there, And say, get to Thailand. And they don't know what the real problem is. That's using medications or just as bad. You're creating a dependent flock. Yeah. Yeah. It's just as bad for chickens

John Gunterman:

as it is for people. It's not sustainable. And you don't know

Mandelyn Royal:

the underlying cause of why the sniffles were there in the first place. Is that an environment, a husbandry issue? Do they have too much ammonia buildup and you're just going to medicate away poor husbandry methods? Is it a infectious disease? Which is especially important to know if you plan to share your birds out to other people, they don't need to be carrying any of that stuff to pass on.

John Gunterman:

No. No. And even if you don't ever plan on Shipping or selling or anything, get an NPIC inspection. Most state inspectors, they have time to come out and just do a courtesy inspection if you want. It's good to know what you have in your flock. They'll take the blood samples back to the lab. It's not gonna be a mandatory, euthanize the flock because you came up with something scary. It's not like that. It's a free inspection and it's a service to you and your neighbors. You need to know what you may have. You need to know what your neighbors may have. Get practice. Get a cheap microscope for 50 bucks online. Learn to do a fecal float. Find out what coccidia you have and what your thresholds are and learn how to keep an eye on it and then you can manage it. Don't just start throwing medicine at things. Find out what is the actual problem. Establish your baselines. What's normal? What's tolerable and when you start creeping out of those zones and respond appropriately, but in my case, I found 100 percent of the time It's been on me with poor husbandry practices Every symptom in my birds has been a flaw in my husbandry

Mandelyn Royal:

It's also a good idea to figure out If your state has a lab to do testing in case you do lose more than one bird to something You can send them off for testing and actually get the real answer of what's going on And that really goes a long way in helping you figure out what your next steps are going to be.

Rip Stalvey:

And folks, John said NPIP, but in case you don't know what that is, that's N P I P or National Poultry Improvement Program. Plant

John Gunterman:

Program. Just Google NPIP for your state and you're good. If it's not free, it's extremely inexpensive to have an inspector come out and sweep your flock.

Rip Stalvey:

For us in Ohio,

Mandelyn Royal:

it's like 75, which is worth it. That's

Rip Stalvey:

still not bad. That's

John Gunterman:

still not bad. That's one order of eggs through the mail if you're going that route, or just selling directly on the farm. The ability to, to your customers say, yes, the inspector was here three weeks ago, here's my inspection results.

Rip Stalvey:

I've got a question here I want to throw out there and this, this is one that gets me going too. If you see a post about, I want to learn how to breed poultry or I want to show how to, I want to learn how to show poultry, what's the first thing they're told? Go buy a standard poultry. Yeah, but that, but why? Yeah, why? What does that accomplish? And the real question they're probably answering or asking is, I want to learn the steps in breeding poultry or I want to learn what's involved in showing poultry. The breed standards are only going to give you one thing, the standard for all the breeds that are recognized by the American Poultry Association or the American Bantam Association. But they don't, trust me, they don't have any how to, why to, or when to type of information in there.

John Gunterman:

No, and all that knowledge is perishable, and with every generation, it is, we're losing it. We need to grasp, On to every bit of it that we have access to and perpetuate that forward. The good, true, proven information. Line breeding, closed breeding, not outcrossing.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, that's one that really grinds my gears online when I'm doom scrolling through the comments, is the insistence that you must outcross every three generations, or you must. Have a lot of diversity in your flock. And after all of the hatching I've done over decades, I'm like, no, that's the exact opposite. Actually.

John Gunterman:

After two to 300 years of very strict controlled closed breeding, there is so much variation in that genome. You're never going to.

Rip Stalvey:

As you and Madeline were talking, I'm sitting here and thinking, there's some flocks out there that have so much diversity in them already. I don't know if they could ever straighten them out.

Mandelyn Royal:

They could through pair breeding.

Rip Stalvey:

Very tightly controlled. It would take them a long time for some of them.

John Gunterman:

If you take eight generations of backbreeding on both sides, and then bring those two together for about eight generations of backbreeding, you could probably get yourself of what I would consider an inbred line. Or an IBL. Your strain. Perfect. But it's going to take 16 years minimum.

Mandelyn Royal:

I think it was Kirby Jackson that made it really click in my mind when he talked about what's that parrot that doesn't even fly, just walks around on the ground on this island and it has been there forever. Lime breeding itself in nature for lord only knows how long and that bird is just fine. It's healthy Perfect.

John Gunterman:

It's perfect for its environment and that's what everybody should be breeding towards Oh, and they

Mandelyn Royal:

all look the same. They're consistent as heck.

John Gunterman:

Mm

Mandelyn Royal:

hmm and perfectly adapted to where they live

John Gunterman:

That's the goal. That's the goal.

Mandelyn Royal:

And every time you interrupt a genetic pool with outside genetics, yeah, you get your diversity, and that's not always a good thing. It's more of a setback more often than not.

John Gunterman:

Exactly. Unless you're doing critical ex situ conservation work, and are doing it in a legitimate research college, Environment. There's never, unless you have the absolute last of some thing and it's only one gender that you have left and you're still never gonna get back to a pure. It's impossible genetically, but hey, what really grinds your gears? Speaking of which, grit. Oh, we haven't harped on that for a little bit. If a species has a gizzard, it needs grit. They're not mammals.

Rip Stalvey:

I was just researching an article the other day about the differences between poultry digestion and mammalian digestion, and this is where a lot of people get confused. Poultry are omnivores, Some mammals are omnivores, but poultry, they're an omnivore, but they have adapted to perform best when eating grains. Mammals depend on, let's take cattle for example. They eat the grass, chickens eat the grass. But mammals are suited to digesting grass. They depend on fermentation. Remunerants,

John Gunterman:

yeah.

Rip Stalvey:

The digestive system of poultry is so fast that it doesn't have time to ferment. So that's some of the biggest reasons. It's just two entirely different types of digestive systems.

John Gunterman:

Their beaks do the ripping and tearing, and then they swallow it down, and then the Gizzard action with the grit does the mastication to extract the nutrients right before it goes out the back end.

Mandelyn Royal:

Several years ago I had a hen that was acting a little bit off so I pulled her and I put her in isolation to see if I could figure out what was going on with her and I was hesitant to call her because she had a lot of value for the breeding program. I was like man I need to figure this out and it looked like her crop was overfilled so I drained it and then started her on some garlic and apple cider vinegar and. Gave her some more grit in case she hadn't gotten enough herself. But over a couple of days, she just got worse and worse. And then she looked like she was on the way out. So I just helped her the rest of the way out. And then I did a home look on the inside and opened her up and she had a intestinal blockage from a giant ball of grass that had worked out of the crop and into. The rest of her digestive tract, just a ball of grass, but it clogged everything up in such a way that it wasn't even fixable anymore. And she was not going to make it no matter what I had done. But by opening her up and looking, I saw exactly why. So I went through a whole bunch of new grit in everybody's pen.

John Gunterman:

And even with grit, sometimes that's going to happen.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah. Cause they might not actually take it up themselves. They like, when we're processing our cockerels, I'll go through and open up all the gizzards and I'm not surprised if I find one cockerel out of every 25 that didn't even have grit in his system, I provide it, it's there, did he pick it up and eat it? So unless I'm going to go out there and start pouring rocks down their throat to make sure there's some birds that just don't take in what they need.

John Gunterman:

I would rather find an empty gizzard on processing day than to have one out in the flock reproducing.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh, yeah.

John Gunterman:

I want birds that are picking up grit and extracting the maximum nutritive value out of the money that I'm putting down their throats. That's ultimately what it comes down to. We're taking our money to the feed store or in raw supplies and watching it come out the back end of the birds. We're taking our money to the feed store or in raw supplies and watching it come out the back end of the birds.

Mandelyn Royal:

Wasn't there a study that showed almost a 20 percent reduction in feed if they had proper grit? I feel like I saw a study somewhere that if you are providing grit and they're taking it up to what they should, it's a reduction in feed because they can digest more efficiently.

Rip Stalvey:

It makes a lot of difference. People don't realize that. Save you a lot of money, too. Mandelyn, you got a question for us? You got a what or a why?

Mandelyn Royal:

I think you had more questions than I did. I have a

John Gunterman:

question, Rip. We haven't heard about your reds in a little bit.

Rip Stalvey:

What's going on with them? They're just in a holding pattern. Getting ready to set some eggs hopefully here right in the near future. I don't like to hatch in when normally everybody else is hatching in that time frame because it just takes so long for reds to really mature. They are slower than molasses in the middle of winter, and no other way to describe it, but they're doing good. They're looking good. I'm switching, I'm going to switch feeds over to Kay Blackman's coming out with a new feed that he's going to call, uh, ShowPro All In. Everything that you need will be in the bag. He's even adding grit to all of the feeds, not just the starter. But all the feeds will have grit added in the feed. That's a pretty neat concept. But no, the Reds are doing well. Interesting. I'm going to give a shout out to Sue Dobson. Sue's bird last year at our Red Club National Beat was the national champion. And this year, another one of Sue's birds was the national champion, but it was shown by J. P. Beck. But the foundation came from Sue. So she's red hot in the red department right now.

John Gunterman:

It's so great to see people succeeding. Being able to share their genetics and their knowledge.

Rip Stalvey:

Yes. So many people today, I don't know what the holdup is and the why, but that is, but they just don't want to seem to share their genetics. That's crazy. Somebody had to share genetics with them.

John Gunterman:

I just really started earnestly and it's, I have mixed feelings about it because first off, I hate the feeling of when I go to the post office, I know I should just stand there and light 20 bills on fire and smash eggs on the sidewalk. Instead of hand them my eggs, cause I'll probably get better results. Sorry, it's not quite that bad, but just what comes out at the other end. It's so heartbreaking to spend literally a month preparing three packages and doing everything you can to make them get there safely and having such horrible results at the other end, but watching the grow outs, wow, so gratifying.

Alex:

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. Be sure to joinn us next Tuesday when our hosts talk poultry; from feathers to function. So long and have a great week.

People on this episode

Head Shot

John Gunterman

Co-host
Head Shot

Mandelyn Royal

Co-host
Head Shot

Rip Stalvey

Co-host